Archive for March, 2005

The first week since the fire happened has just passed. This is a picture I captured with my camera phone, with the red arrow pointing to our apartment. I took the picture while the firemen were still shooting water right into our place.

Things seem to be a lot better now. Sunday I decided to stop doing everything and just chill, and it worked out pretty fine. I needed to just get away from all the craziness and relax. Being able to dig through the rubble is rather theraputic. It doesn’t matter how much I have salvaged, it doesn’t matter whether any of the stuff still work. And it definitely doesn’t matter whether I will keep them. Being able to be there and sift through the belongings gave me closure. It helped me to move on and left the past behind.

When a situation like this happens, what can you really do? It’s just awful. Everything is wiped out, memories and sentimental artefacts. To those who concern, we are fine. No physical injuries. The cat is ok. We are all very lucky. I have managed to salvage some stuff (afterall, just stuff) today with generous help from friends. Thank you all. To those whom we haven’t informed yet, our apartment had a fire and it’s completely trashed. Stuff, just stuff.

Eros is finally, finally, finally, finally here. There is finally an official website for the movie. E. posted the site on his blog and it amazes me how quick he is on finding these kinds of things. Thank you, thank you! You have no idea how excited I am to see the website, and knowing that the movie is finally being released. Yes, finally!

I have never, ever, been longing for a movie for so damn long. Antonioni’s latest piece, The Dangerious Thread of Things is 1 of the 3 short films in Eros. Yes, I like Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar Wai, who are the other 2 filmmakers featured in Eros, but nothing compares to my fascination and excitement for Antonioni’s latest piece!

On my Antonioni Archive, I constantly wrote about my anticipation for his new work, now it’s here, and I can’t wait to see it (of course). I have no expection whatsoever, I just want to sit in front of the screen and see it, damn it.

I have been really into Harry Potter lately. I mean, I have always refused to read it, thought they were too “popular” to read. Anyway, I read the first 3 volumes in the past 3 weeks and I have really gotten into them. Super fast read and fun. Sometimes I just fast food for my brain.

So what have I been doing lately? Work, work and more work. Really, it’s not that bad. I have been trying to put the Wireless Home tour together for this weekend. It has been working pretty well and the test ran well. I hope everything will go well this weekend when the tour goes live.

A couple of days ago we went to see Joan Rivers for O.’s birthday. Seriously, she didn’t look scary at all, but she did look surprisingly well. Seriously. Seriously!!! I was sitting right in the front, so I was her target all night long; but it was okay as she seemed to enjoy my responses anyway. At one point she was so glad that she had to hold my hand. It was a pretty fun and foul night.

We went to see Laurie Anderson’s The End of the Moon at BAM last night. It was rather unforgettable. Last time I saw Anderson’s performance was 6 years ago, and compared to that, I think I was simply more into it this time.

This time, the first thing I realized was that her set is so much more minimalistic. She has her wireless electronic (I think) violin/viola and a tiny little station — everything seems to be small, compact and elegant. She has an iPod-like control pad that she touches slightly over time. She has a touch-pad-like keyboard/control center of the size of a laptop that seems to do just about everything (I just wish that I can see how it really looks like). She kicks and steps on some switches on the floor as well. And those were all the equipment she has to deal with. It was incredibly simple. I got to focus much more on her words, voice and music than to see her busily running around, operating the equipment. It was therefore a much more mellow and calmer piece.

Interestingly, she has a toggle switch that I could hear the click when she flips to switch the video projection. All of a sudden I was brought back to the non-digital world, almost.

On this piece time she doesn’t sing at all. I would love to hear that but her calming voice seems to be just enough already.

She talks about that fear is always at the beginning, just like stuttering. One stutters at the beginning of utterance, like st-st-st-stuttering. Fear doesn’t come near the end, just as one doesn’t stutter at the end of a word, like stuttering-ring-ring-ring. Because at the end, fear turns into regrets.

When she says, “I could almost smell light,” for me, that’s almost the height of the evening for me. I was in a trance.

From BAM:

No wonder NASA chose Laurie Anderson as its first artist-in-residence. An intrepid multimedia pioneer long obsessed with our ever-changing romance with technology and how we think about ourselves in relation to the rest of the planet, Anderson weaves stories, music, songs, and words into epic portraits of American culture.

The End of the Moon, the second in a series of intentionally low-tech solo works featuring her remarkable music for violin and electronics, marks Anderson’s fifth BAM production. A decidedly more contemplative sister to her first solo effort, the extraordinary, sharply observed Happiness, The End of the Moon turns to the incisive power of words to convey how we feel about ourselves at this complex juncture. Drawing from her NASA-inspired travels and research, impression-packed journals, dreams, and theories, Anderson takes us on a music-theater journey that examines, among many other compelling themes, 21st-century perceptions of beauty and time, and the stories we exchange to help us along the way.